Former Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo said that law unfolds to the
limits of its logic. This is now happening to Roe vs. Wade.

In 1973 and again in 1992, the Supreme Court upheld abortion on the grounds
that a woman has a fundamental right of privacy to control the use of her body.
The court spoke of the "urgent claims of the woman to retain the ultimate
control over her destiny and her body" and affirmed that "personal decisions
that profoundly affect bodily integrity, identity and destiny should be largely
beyond the reach of government."

The impact of such a broadly based privacy ruling is now reaching elsewhere.
A Florida woman calling herself Jane Roe II has challenged the constitutionality
of Florida's law against prostitution. She states her case clearly and
logically: If a woman's right to control the use of her reproductive organs
permits her to enter into a cash transaction with an abortionist, then how can
this fundamental right of privacy not apply to other transactions involving her
use of her body?

Some might reply that prostitution is illegal. But so was abortion until the
court declared it a constitutional right. Others might say prostitution is
immoral. But this argument also goes nowhere. In his book, Crime and
Punishment in American History, Lawrence Friedman wrote that abortion
has been against the law and restricted with greater intensity for more of our
history than prostitution, reflecting social norms that abortion, viewed as
infanticide, is more immoral than prostitution.

In exercising her right to abortion, the woman also affects the "bodily
integrity, identity and destiny" of the fetus by obliterating it. The unborn is
not a consenting party to the transaction.

In contrast, prostitution is entirely an act between consenting parties that
does not affect the bodily integrity, identity and destiny of a third party.

Under the privacy ruling of Roe vs. Wade, prostitution is
logically within the woman's rights to control the use of her own reproductive
organs. This privacy right can only expand. It is legal nonsense that privacy
conveys the right to abort, but not the right to ingest drugs or engage in
sodomy.

The Supreme Court has put the country in this conundrum because the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Educationdesegregation ruling
created a precedent for the court to base its rulings on sociology and not law.

In their book about the Supreme Court, The Brethren, Bob
Woodward and Scott Armstrong documented the sociological basis of the court's
abortion decision.

Rather than consult the law books in his court chambers, Justice Harry
Blackmun concocted Roe's "right to privacy" rationale in the
Rochester, Minn., library of the Mayo Clinic, where he immersed himself in the
latest sociological and medical writings on abortion.

An argument can be made that law should follow the practices of people and,
therefore, take guidance from sociology. However, genocide is also a human
practice, and if sociology evicts the moral dimension of law, there can be no
more Nuremberg Trials.

According to William Blackstone, the genius of English common law was that it
mirrored the behavior of people who were infused with the spirit of Christ. In
an amoral climate, decisions based on sociology will overturn traditional law.

The Supreme Court's sociology-based rulings will give us more than the
justices bargained for. Beyond abortion, prostitution and drugs will become
rights.

Already, judges are arguing that racial rage is a mitigating factor in racial
murders. Federal Appeals Court Judge Rosemary Barkett interpreted the murder of
a white by a black as a "social awareness case." The murder was "effectuated to
focus attention on a chronic and pervasive illness of racial discrimination and
of hurt, sorrow, and rejectionů The victim was a symbolic representative of the
class causing the perceived injustice."

From the sounds of it, judicial sociology is coming close to running away
with the laws against murder, too. As Blackstone noted, if judges substitute
their feelings for law, as many different rules of action would be "laid down in
our courts as there are differences of capacity and sentiment in the human
mind."

The result, he said, would be the "most infinite confusion," a result we now
have. It will be interesting to watch the court sort out on the basis of
Roevs.Wade why it is legal for a woman to
contract for abortion but not prostitution.